"One might think that as a country grows economically, the majority of the underweight population would move into the average BMI range, but our study shows the opposite: People of average weight are disappearing," says Fahad Razak, the study’s lead author and a U of T clinical fellow working in the internal medicine unit at St. Michael’s Hospital.

"This growing trend of body weight extremes is going to pose a major challenge for health care and policy leaders," says Razak. "They will need to balance their priorities between addressing health issues afflicting the underweight who happen to be poor, and health issues afflicting the obese and overweight—the upper middle-class and rich."

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As far as I'm concerned, this issue is part of the larger issue of how we achieve and measure economic prosperity. As long as the greatest economic powers are also the ones with the greatest gaps between the rich and the poor, findings like this should not come as a surprise.